Flash Fiction: The Reunion

Chapter 3 (of 3)

I awoke slowly, a slight filter of light creeping through the slat in the blinds. A smile crossed my face as I remembered the night before, the night with Emily. After 10 years of regret, a few simple hours had turned my life around. I rolled over, casting my arm to fall over her sleeping form.

When I found empty sheets, I sat up. Still bleary from the night before, I looked around my room. Her clothes still lay strewn about the room, cast aside in a fervent urgency that both of us had succumbed to. I stood up, pulling a rumpled sheet free from the tangle in the bed and wrapping it around my waist.

I softly crept from my bedroom and into the hallway. My entire body felt alive, feeling the strands of carpet on my feet and the cool breeze of the air condition raising goosebumps on my skin. As I reached the end of the hall I stopped. Caught against the breaking dawn, Emily stood framed in the patio doorway. Clad only in my white dress shirt, the breaking sun framed her in a glow of orange and red. The oversized shirt was nearly translucent in the burgeoning light, casting her body in shadow. I watched silently as she took a drag from a cigarette, her hair rustling softly in the morning current. She never turned around, just staring into the morning, her arm perched on the frame of the door, one foot bent slightly. That picture, Emily aglow in my life, set against the dawn, burned deeply into my heart.

I turned around and walked slowly back to my room, not wanting to break her reverie, not wanting to ruin a perfect moment. I laid down on the bed, pulling the covers against my skin and drifted back off to sleep. I had all the time now, life was perfect.


Later that morning I awoke and read the note she had left for me. We all had regrets she said, and her regret was that I had waited 10 years to tell her something she had always known. I had broken her heart those years past, and now she had broken mine.

End of Line.
Gerrad!